The Record

4:11 pm

Wed February 27, 2013

SFX Entertainment Buys Beatport

Beatport, one of the most popular online stores for fans of dance music, has been bought by SFX Entertainment, a company that has invested heavily in the dance music business over the past year. According to sources with direct knowledge of the deal, the company was sold for around $50 million.

"[With this purchase] you now have a great one-stop shop for consumers of dance music," says SFX Entertainment CMO Chris Stephenson.

For many fans of dance music, Beatport serves as the Internet's front page. The website, which caters to DJs and dance music fans, has over a million high-quality songs in its store. It also hosts a blog, offers DJ playlists and keeps a chart of the most downloaded music on the site that has become a reliable indicator of trends in the ever-shifting genre. By the site's own estimate, it serves over 40 million users each year.

Founded in 2012 by media mogul Robert F.X. Sillerman, SFX has spent the last year investing heavily in dance music, largely in the live concert business. Before its acquisition of Beatport, SFX already owned a slew of dance music promotion companies and events, including Disco Donnie Presents, which promotes over 100 annual events, and Life in Color (formerly Dayglow), which is one of the largest dance music tours in North America. Sillerman has said that he plans to invest a billion dollars into the dance music industry.

"We have some of the best festival brands in the world", says Stephenson, "and now we have the number one digital destination for fans of this music."

"We are absolutely only at the beginning of what's going on here," adds Matt Adell, CEO of Beatport. "It's the end of the guitar and the beginning of the laptop. The vision of combining events and digital to create an electronic dance music ecosystem, not just music but video, news and other editorial is really what Beatport's always been about. Now with this partnership we can really unleash our innovative capabilities to build and develop those products globally."